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S. DENG/ALAMY/ACI
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In these polarizing times, it’s worth remembering that Spain reached its full flower in places where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish people, forging a common cultural identity, created breakthroughs in architecture, design, science, and thought.
The multicultural union was not exactly tolerance as we would know it, historian María Rosa Menocal wrote, but the “often unconscious acceptance that contradictions—within oneself, as well as within one’s culture—could be positive and productive.” The age came to a swift end; royals Ferdinand and Isabella persecuted the Moors and the Jews—and sent out explorers who, in seeking vast riches, would persecute Indigenous people in the Americas.
But in Córdoba, Toledo, and Granada, you can see traces of Spain’s turbulent and collaborative history. Stunning Islamic and Christian styles are visible through Córdoba‘s cathedral-mosque complex (pictured above)—an “Ornament of the World,” as Menocal put it. (Below, the chapel of the Sacrarium.)
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